


It Doesn't Stop

by Kirrifish



Category: Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Genre: Aging, Angst, Drabble, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22129003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirrifish/pseuds/Kirrifish
Summary: "Time and tide wait for no man." ~Geoffrey Chaucer
Relationships: Ike & Senerio | Soren, Ike/Senerio | Soren
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	It Doesn't Stop

**Author's Note:**

> Written October 9, 2009 and edited September 3, 2014
> 
> Average lifespan (FE Path of Radiance: Tellius Recollection Volume 1):  
> Beorc: 60 years  
> 1/2 Black Dragon (Branded): 185 years  
> 

The days skulk by, creeping around his ears in drifting circles. The timepiece behind them does not care how many déjà vus he experiences. It does not retire for the night, does not hibernate in the winter, does not quicken or slow. Like the tide, it ebbs and flows, always at a steady pace, set by a force out of this world. It refuses to be tampered with, refuses to be bridled. Though the hues of the sky are different, the dirt beneath his feet is different, the setting and rising of the sun mean nothing to him. Time commits nothing to him. Seconds, minutes, hours; days, weeks, months — What relevance do years hold for someone whose lifespan surpasses a hundred of them?

He stays up late, wakes early. Time is immune to his actions, indiscernible from his appearance. He has looked like this for decades. He will look like this for decades.

His hair does not stop growing. Every morning he wakes, it is slightly longer than it was the night before. Inch by inch, it creeps down his neck, his shoulders, his back. The slowly lengthening blackness is a quiet warning, whispering somebody else’s fate in his ear.

Sometimes, Ike points it out to him. “Soren,” he says in an offhand tone, as if it is the first time he is saying it, “your hair. It’s getting a little long, isn’t it?”

Because with every day that passes, Ike’s deep blue hair turns a little grayer, his face becomes a little more wrinkled, his joints get a little stiffer. And yet, Soren remains the same.

Soren remembers the first time he lifted his eyes to Ike's hand, seeing past the proffered lunch. His hand was small, young, smooth. A child's hand. He looks at Ike’s hand now, the same hand: thick blue veins poking through a pockmarked skin, stretched old with the sun, calloused from decades of wielding steel and iron.

And every time he looks at Ike, Stefan’s offer echoes a little louder in his ear, though he shirks from it: _"When the time comes — and you will know when — ride to Grann Desert. You have friends there.”_

He does not understand that word in its plural tense; Ike is his only friend. Soren does not envision life with anyone else. He cannot, for life without Ike is not life at all — he’s known this from the moment that blue-haired boy, now many decades a man, extended that small hand to him in the streets of Gallia. By the time the cogwheel of Ike's life has completed a full revolution, Soren's will have rotated a fraction.

He cuts his hair but soon it reaches past his back again, and keeps growing.

The days skulk by, creeping around his ears in drifting circles.


End file.
